The Life of Joan of Arc Part 32

Then the word fell to Brother Guillaume Aimery: "According to what you have said, the Voice told you that G.o.d will deliver the people of France from their distress; but if G.o.d will deliver them he has no need of men-at-arms."

"In G.o.d's name," replied the Maid, "the men-at-arms will fight, and G.o.d will give the victory."

Maitre Guillaume declared himself satisfied.[748]

[Footnote 748: _Ibid._, pp. 203, 204.]

On the 22nd of March, Maitre Pierre de Versailles and Maitre Jean erault went together to Jean Rabateau's lodging. The squire, Gobert Thibault, whom Jeanne had already seen at Chinon, came with them. He was a young man and very simple, one who believed without asking for a sign. As they came in Jeanne went to meet them, and, striking the squire on the shoulder, in a friendly manner, she said: "I wish I had many men as willing as you."[749]

[Footnote 749: _Ibid._, p. 74.]

With men-at-arms she felt at her ease. But the doctors she could not tolerate, and she suffered torture when they came to argue with her.

Although these theologians showed her great consideration, their eternal questions wearied her; their slowness and heaviness exasperated her. She bore them a grudge for not believing in her straightway, without proof, and for asking her for a sign, which she could not give them, since neither Saint Michael nor Saint Catherine nor Saint Margaret appeared during the examination. In retirement, in the oratory, and in the lonely fields the heavenly visitants came to her in crowds; angels and saints, descending from heaven, flocked around her. But when the doctors came, immediately the Jacob's ladder was drawn up. Besides, the clerks were theologians, and she was a saint. Relations are always strained between the heads of the Church Militant and those devout women who communicate directly with the Church Triumphant. She realised that the revelations granted to her so abundantly inspired her most favourable judges with doubts, suspicion, and even mistrust. She dared not confide to them much of the mystery of her Voices, and when the Churchmen were not present she told Alencon, her fair Duke, that she knew more and could do more than she had ever told all those clerks.[750] It was not to them she had been sent; it was not for them that she had come. She felt awkward in their presence, and their manners were the occasion of that irritation which is discernible in more than one of her replies.[751] Sometimes when they questioned her she retreated to the end of her bench and sulked.

[Footnote 750: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 92.]

[Footnote 751: _Chronique de la Pucelle_, p. 275.]

"We come to you from the King," said Maitre Pierre de Versailles.

She replied with a bad grace: "I am quite aware that you are come to question me again. I don't know A from B."[752] But to the question: "Wherefore do you come?" she made answer eagerly: "I come from the King of Heaven to raise the siege of Orleans, and take the King to be crowned and anointed at Reims. Maitre Jean erault, have you ink and paper? Write what I shall tell you." And she dictated a brief manifesto to the English captains: "You, Suffort, Clasdas, and La Poule, in the name of the King of Heaven I call upon you to return to England."[753]

[Footnote 752: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 74 (evidence of Gobert Thibault).]

[Footnote 753: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 74. Boucher de Molandon and A. de Beaucorps, _L'armee anglaise_, p. 111. La Poule, as he is called here, is identical with Suffort, and is none other than William Pole, Earl of Suffolk, unless John Pole, William's brother, be intended, but he was not one of the three organisers of the siege. As for Clasdas or Glasdale, as the French called him, he served under the orders of the Commander of Les Tourelles. These errors may have been Jeanne's, or possibly they were made by the witness. They do not recur in the letter to the English.]

Maitre Jean erault, who wrote at her dictation, was, like most of the clerks, favourably disposed towards her. Further, he had his own ideas. He recollected that Marie of Avignon, surnamed La Gasque, had uttered true and memorable prophecies to King Charles VI. Now La Gasque had told the King that the realm was to suffer many sorrows; and she had seen weapons in the sky. Her story of her vision had concluded with these words: "While I was afeard, believing myself called upon to take these weapons, a voice comforted me, saying: 'They are not for thee, but for a Virgin, who shall come and with these weapons deliver the realm of France.'" Maitre Jean erault meditated on these marvellous revelations and came to believe that Jeanne was the Virgin announced by Marie of Avignon.[754]

[Footnote 754: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 83.]

Maitre Gerard Machet, the King's Confessor, had found it written that a Maid should come to the help of the King of France. He remarked on it to Gobert Thibault, the Squire, who was no very great personage;[755] and he certainly spoke of it to several others.

Gerard Machet, Doctor of Theology, sometime Vice Chancellor of the University, from which he was now excluded, was regarded as one of the lights of the Church. He loved the court,[756] although he would not admit it, and enjoyed the favour of the King, who had just rewarded his services by giving him money with which to purchase a mule.[757]

All doubts concerning the disposition of these doctors are removed by the discovery that the King's Confessor himself put into circulation those prophecies which had been distorted in favour of the Maid from the Bois-Chenu.

[Footnote 755: _Ibid._, p. 75.]

[Footnote 756: _Lettres de Gerard Machet_, Bibl. nat. Latin doc.u.ments, no. 8577. Launoy, _Regii Navarrae Gymnasii Parisiensis historia_, Paris, 1682 (2 vols. in 4to), vol. ii, pp. 533, 557. Du Boulay, _Hist.

Univ. Parisiensis_, vol. v, p. 875. Vallet de Viriville, in _Nouvelle biographie generale_.]

[Footnote 757: De Beaucourt, _Extrait du catalogue des actes de Charles VII_, p. 18.]

The damsel was interrogated concerning her Voices, which she called her Council, and her saints, whom she imagined in the semblance of those sculptured or painted figures peopling the churches.[758] The doctors objected to her having cast off woman's clothing and had her hair cut round in the manner of a page. Now it is written: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy G.o.d" (Deuteronomy xxii, 5). The Council of Gangres, held in the reign of the Emperor Valens, had anathematised women who dressed as men and cut short their hair.[759] Many saintly women, impelled by a strange inspiration of the Holy Ghost, had concealed their s.e.x by masculine garb. At Saint-Jean-des-Bois, near Compiegne, was preserved the reliquary of Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria, who lived for thirty-eight years in man's attire in the monastery of the Abbot Theodosius.[760] For these reasons, and because of these precedents, the doctors argued: since Jeanne had put on this clothing not to offend another's modesty but to preserve her own, we will put no evil interpretation on an act performed with good intent, and we will forbear to condemn a deed justified by purity of motive.

[Footnote 758: _Trial_, vol. i, pp. 71, 72, 73, 171.]

[Footnote 759: Labbe, _Sacro-Sancta Consilia_ (1671), vol. ii, pp.

413, 434.]

[Footnote 760: Surius, _Vitae S.S._ (1618), vol. i, pp. 21-24. Gabriel Brosse, _Histoire abregee de la vie et de la translation de Sainte Euphrosine, Vierge d'Alexandrie, patronne de l'abbaye de Beaulieu-les-Compiegne_, Paris, 1649, in 8vo.]

Certain of her questioners inquired why she called Charles Dauphin instead of giving him his t.i.tle of King. This t.i.tle had been his by right since the 30th of October, 1422; for on that day, the ninth since the death of the King his father, at Mehun-sur-Yevre, in the chapel royal, he had put off his black gown and a.s.sumed the purple robe, while the heralds, raising aloft the banner of France, cried: "Long live the King!"

She answered: "I will not call him King until he shall have been anointed and crowned at Reims. To that city I intend to take him."[761]

[Footnote 761: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 20.]

Without this anointing there was no king of France for her. Of the miracles which had followed that anointing she had heard every year from the mouth of her priest as he recited the glorious deeds of the Blessed Saint Remi, the patron saint of her parish. This reply was such as to satisfy the interrogators because, both for things spiritual and temporal, it was important that the King should be anointed at Reims.[762] And Messire Regnault de Chartres must have ardently desired it.

[Footnote 762: It may be noticed that during the consultation of the doctors, according to the report of it given by Thoma.s.sin in _Le registre Delphinal_, Charles of Valois is designated alike by the t.i.tle of King and by that of Dauphin (_Trial_, vol. iv, p. 303).]

Contradicted by the clerks, she opposed the Church's doctrine by the inspiration of her own heart, and said to them: "There is more in the Book of Our Lord than in all yours."[763]

[Footnote 763: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 86.]

This was a bold and biting reply, which would have been dangerous had the theologians been less favourably inclined to her. Otherwise they might have held it to be trespa.s.sing on the rights of the Church, who, as the guardian of the Holy Books, is their jealous interpreter, and does not suffer the authority of Scripture to be set up against the decisions of Councils.[764] What were those books, which without having read she judged to be contrary to those of Our Lord, wherein with mind and spirit she seemed to read plainly? They would seem to be the Sacred Canons and the Sacred Decretals. This child's utterance sapped the very foundations of the Church. Had the doctors of Poitiers been less zealously Armagnac they would henceforth have mistrusted Jeanne and suspected her of heresy. But they were loyal servants of the houses of Orleans and of France. Their ca.s.socks were ragged and their larders empty;[765] their only hope was in G.o.d, and they feared lest in rejecting this damsel they might be denying the Holy Ghost.

Besides, everything went to prove that these words of Jeanne were uttered without guile and in all ignorance and simplicity. No doubt that is why the doctors were not shocked by them.

[Footnote 764: Le Pere Didon, _Vie de Jesus_, vol. i, Preface.]

[Footnote 765: Juvenal des Ursins, _Histoire de Charles VI_, p. 359.]

Brother Seguin of Seguin in his turn questioned the damsel. He was from Limousin, and his speech betrayed his origin. He spoke with a drawl and used expressions unknown in Lorraine and Champagne. Perhaps he had that dull, heavy air, which rendered the folk of his province somewhat ridiculous in the eyes of dwellers on the Loire, the Seine, and the Meuse. To the question: "What language do your Voices speak?"

Jeanne replied: "A better one than yours."[766]

[Footnote 766: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 204.]

Even saints may lose patience. If Brother Seguin did not know it before, he learnt it that day. And what business had he to doubt that Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, who were on the side of the French, spoke French? Such a doubt Jeanne could not bear, and she gave her questioner to understand that when one comes from Limousin one does not inquire concerning the speech of heavenly ladies.

Notwithstanding he pursued his interrogation: "Do you believe in G.o.d?"

"Yes, more than you do," said the Maid, who, knowing nothing of the good Brother, was somewhat hasty in esteeming herself better grounded in the faith than he.

But she was vexed that there should be any question of her belief in G.o.d, who had sent her. Her reply, if favourably interpreted, would testify to the ardour of her faith. Did Brother Seguin so understand it? His contemporaries represented him as being of a somewhat bitter disposition. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that he was good-natured.[767]

[Footnote 767: It seems to have been the fate of the inhabitants of Limousin to be jeered at by the French of Champagne and of l'ile de France. After Brother Seguin we have the student from Limousin to whom Pantagruel says: "Thou art Limousin to the bone and yet here thou wilt pa.s.s thyself off as a Parisian." It is the lot of M. de Pourceaugnac.

La Fontaine, in 1663, writes from Limoges to his wife that the people of Limousin are by no means afflicted; neither do they labour under Heaven's displeasure "as the folk of our provinces imagine." But he adds that he does not like their habits. It would seem that at first Brother Seguin was annoyed by Jeanne's mocking vivacious repartees.

But he cherished no ill-will against her. "The Limousin's good nature does not permit the endurance of any unfriendly feeling," says Abel Hugo in _La France pittoresque: Haute-Vienne_. Cf. A. Precicou, _Rabelais et les Limousins_, Limoges, 1906, in 8vo.]

"But after all," he said, "it cannot be G.o.d's will that you should be believed unless some sign appear to make us believe in you. On your word alone we cannot counsel the King to run the risk of granting you men-at-arms."

"In G.o.d's name," she answered, "it was not to give a sign that I came to Poitiers. But take me to Orleans and I will show you the signs wherefore I am sent. Let me be given men, it matters not how many, and I will go to Orleans."

And she repeated what she was continually saying: "The English shall all be driven out and destroyed. The siege of Orleans shall be raised and the city delivered from its enemies, after I shall have summoned it to surrender in the name of the King of Heaven. The Dauphin shall be anointed at Reims, the town of Paris shall return to its allegiance to the King, and the Duke of Orleans shall come back from England."[768]

[Footnote 768: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 205.]

Long did the doctors and masters, following the example of Brother Seguin of Seguin, urge her to show a sign of her mission. They thought that if G.o.d had chosen her to deliver the French nation he would not fail to make his choice manifest by a sign, as he had done for Gideon, the son of Joash. When Israel was sore pressed by the Midianites, and when G.o.d's chosen people hid from their enemies in the caves of the mountains, the Angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon under an oak, and said unto him: "Surely I will be with thee and thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man." To which Gideon made answer: "If now I have found grace in thy sight, then shew me a sign that thou talkest with me." And Gideon made ready a kid and kneaded unleavened cakes; the flesh he put in a basket, and he put the broth in a pot and brought the pot and the basket beneath the oak. Then the Angel of G.o.d said unto him: "Take the flesh and the unleavened cakes, and lay them upon this rock, and pour out the broth." And he did so. Then the angel of the Lord put forth the end of the staff that was in his hand, and touched the flesh and the unleavened cakes; and there rose up fire out of the rock, and consumed the flesh and the unleavened cakes. When Gideon perceived that he had seen an angel of the Lord, he cried out: "Alas, O Lord G.o.d! for because I have seen an angel of the Lord face to face."[769] With three hundred men Gideon subdued the Midianites.

This example the doctors had before their minds.[770]

[Footnote 769: Judges, ch. vi. (W.S.).]